The present invention relates to an article suitable for making an electrical connection between at least two electrical conductors, for example the conductors in a coaxial or shielded cable, and an electrical component, for example a printed circuit board.
Numerous methods have been proposed for making an electrical connection between coaxial cables and printed circuit boards. One previously proposed device for making such a connection comprises a pair of heat-shrinkable sleeves, each of which contains a ring of solder. An end portion of one of the sleeves is received within, and is firmly bonded to, an end portion of the other sleeve to form, in effect, a single heat-shrinkable sleeve containing two solder rings. The device includes a single preinstalled pin of round crosssection having each of its ends in a part of the sleeve and having its central region such that it can be cut to give two separate parts of the pin, which parts can be positioned in a desired place. The central region of the pin maintains the desired shape of the pin when the device is installed (by heating to cause the heat-shrinkable sleeves to shrink and the solder to fuse) on the stripped end of the coaxial cable. When the device has been installed on the cable, the pin is cut and the two parts of the pin can be inserted in appropriately spaced holes in a printed circuit board.
While the above-described device is very useful in many situations, it has the disadvantage that the spacing between the two parts of the pin obtained after cutting is determined by the shape of the pin (and thus by the manufacturer), and that a different device is therefore required for each board having a different hole spacing. This disadvantage is a considerable one as spacings on printed circuit boards are not standard: small variations can occur, for example, between metric and English system boards (a metric board, for example, having a 5 mm spacing while the corresponding English board may have a spacing of 0.200 inch = 5.08 mm), while large variations (for example from 2.54 mm (0.1 inch) to 6.35 mm (0.25 inch)) can occur between one user and another. The manufacturer is thus faced with the problem of supplying many different devices, each with a different pin.